Tympan-uhmmm?

During our AP art history unit on Romanesque Europe, our class learned to both love and despise (not exactly in that order…) the Romanesque church portal. After viewing many slides, learning about the most commonly depicted motifs, and stumbling over the pronunciation of “voussoirs,” our brilliant teacher Mr. Lovell challenged us to pair off and create our own portal, modeling the tympanum theme after one of the images we had studied. After two class periods of work, here is our final product (see picture above).

We used the tympanum of the center portal of the narthex of La Madeleine in Vézelay, France as our model (see picture above). The church’s tympanum illustrates the Pentecost and mission of the apostles, depicting Christ in a mandorla as the central figure instilling the Holy Spirit in the apostles. So, naturally, our rendition depicts a lion as the king of the jungle…? It’s a stretch, but our portal is at least structurally accurate. We illustrated the trumeau and two jambs as tree trunks and adorned the jambs with ascending serpents. Our voussoirs are depicted as large jungle leaves that create a standard archivolt. For the tympanum we drew a central lion inside a mandorla to represent Christ and surrounded him with stereotypical jungle animals to serve as the twelve apostles. Along the lintel we illustrated groups of people running in fear to the right and left away from Christ, representing humanity awaiting salvation.

Despite our questionable rendition, the assignment was a tremendous help in understanding not only the architecture that makes up Romanesque church portals, but also the crucial role they played in society at the time. Now we know our tympanums from our trumeaus!